Posts Tagged ‘Dmitri Trofimovic Shepilov’

"Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any people for twenty years."

A few days ago we discussed the new theory that French writer and Nobel laureate Albert Camus may have been snuffed by the KGB.

According to the new theory:  “The order was given personally by [Dmitri Trofimovic] Shepilov [the Soviet foreign minister] as a reaction to an article published in Franc-tireur [a French magazine] in March 1957, in which Camus attacked [Shepilov], naming him explicitly in the events in Hungary.” In his piece, Camus had denounced the “Shepilov Massacres” – Moscow’s decision to send troops to crush the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

I got curious, of course, so I tried to look up this article – so far I’ve failed.  But I did find this famous 1957 speech on the first anniversary of the Hungarian revolt, “The Blood of the Hungarians.”  It’s punchy stuff.  If the Franc-tireur article is anything like it, it’s no surprise the KGB was chagrined.

Since this has been a day with more than the usual dispiriting portions of  gutlessness, I include a long excerpt:

I am not one of those who wish to see the people of Hungary take up arms again in a rising certain to be crushed, under the eyes of the nations of the world, who would spare them neither applause nor pious tears, but who would go back at one to their slippers by the fireside like a football crowd on a Sunday evening after a cup final.

There are already too many dead on the field, and we cannot be generous with any but our own blood. The blood of Hungary has re-emerged too precious to Europe and to freedom for us not to be jealous of it to the last drop.

But I am not one of those who think that there can be a compromise, even one made with resignation, even provisional, with a regime of terror which has as much right to call itself socialist as the executioners of the Inquisition had to call themselves Christians.

And on this anniversary of liberty, I hope with all my heart that the silent resistance of the people of Hungary will endure, will grow stronger, and, reinforced by all the voices which we can raise on their behalf, will induce unanimous international opinion to boycott their oppressors.

And if world opinion is too feeble or egoistical to do justice to a martyred people, and if our voices also are too weak, I hope that Hungary’s resistance will endure until the counter-revolutionary State collapses everywhere in the East under the weight of its lies and contradictions.

Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any people for twenty years. But for this lesson to get through and convince those in the West who shut their eyes and ears, it was necessary, and it can be no comfort to us, for the people of Hungary to shed so much blood which is already drying in our memories.

In Europe’s isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for, never to condone, among ourselves and everywhere, even indirectly, those who killed them.  …

Those Hungarian workers and intellectuals, beside whom we stand today with such impotent sorrow, understood this and have made us the better understand it. That is why, if their distress is ours, their hope is ours also. In spite of their misery, their chains, their exile, they have left us a glorious heritage which we must deserve: freedom, which they did not win, but which in one single day they gave back to us.

On the verge of a breakthrough? (Photo: NY World-Telegram/Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection)

There is a danger, of course, in being exposed to literature too young.  So when  I read Albert Camus‘s L’Etranger in high school, in French and in English, it was like being punished twice.  I thought it a squalid little book.  I never returned to it, so I’ve never reconsidered my youthful impression.

But I have changed my mind several times in recent years about the author.

Camus himself seems to have been a remarkable man.  Czeslaw Milosz, for example, praised Camus as the only man in postwar Paris who remained friendly to him after the Polish poet’s 1951 defection.  The entire French intellectual class, which was entirely left-wing, turned against him for abandoning the communist dream.  Pablo Neruda denounced him in an essay as “The Man Who Ran Away” (and if anyone has ever seen the article, I’d love to get a copy).  And recently, I’ve been reading René Girard, who praised La Chute as an “admirable and liberating book” in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.

Now we hear that the Soviet authorities hated him enough to have the KGB snuff him in 1960 – at least according to a new report in Corriere della Sera, which was reported in The Guardian.  Another point in his favor:

The theory is based on remarks by Giovanni Catelli, an Italian academic and poet, who noted that a passage in a diary written by the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana, and published as a book entitled Celý život, was missing from the Italian translation. In the missing paragraph, Zábrana writes: “I heard something very strange from the mouth of a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources. According to him, the accident that had cost Albert Camus his life in 1960 was organised by Soviet spies. They damaged a tyre on the car using a sophisticated piece of equipment that cut or made a hole in the wheel at speed.

“The order was given personally by [Dmitri Trofimovic] Shepilov [the Soviet foreign minister] as a reaction to an article published in Franc-tireur [a French magazine] in March 1957, in which Camus attacked [Shepilov], naming him explicitly in the events in Hungary.” In his piece, Camus had denounced the “Shepilov Massacres” – Moscow’s decision to send troops to crush the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

Camus, who won the 1957 Nobel Prize in literature, angered the Soviets even more when he publicly supported Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, nominating the clandestine novel for a Nobel. I tell the astonishing story of its Cold War publication here and a little bit here.

Pasternak: The final straw (Courtesy of Hoover Institution Archives)

Oliver Todd, author of Albert Camus: Une Vie, doesn’t necessarily believe the new assassination theory:

“My first reaction is that nothing about the activities of the KGB and its successors would surprise me, but this claim has left me flabbergasted. You have to ask yourself who would benefit from this coming out and why.”He added: “It’s interesting and amusing and it is certainly true that KGB documentation is full of accounts of how the Soviets used the Czechs to do their dirty work. But while I wouldn’t put it past the KGB to do such a thing, I don’t believe the story is true.”

But I have to admit that, whether it’s true or not, the fact that the story is plausible enough to publish makes me almost ready to take on La Chute, though I’m still creeped out by L’Etranger‘s  Meursault.

But the fatal car accident en route to the René Girard’s own native Provence was a different kind of tragedy.  His final published novel,  La Chute, René said, marked a turning a point:  “Albert Camus died at the moment when a whole new career was probably opening up for him.”

Read the whole story here.